Budget 2026 should be a children’s budget, says Labour

Free GP care and public transport for children are some of the proposals Labour have put forward in an alternative budget, with leader Ivana Bacik saying they are making a case for a “children’s budget”.

The Labour Party also said it would abolish the means test on the Carer’s Allowance, increase social welfare rates and charge a windfall tax on energy profits and data centres to pay for targeted energy support payments to households.

Speaking at the launch on Thursday finance spokesman Ged Nash TD insisted the plans are “fully funded through sustainable taxes”.

At the alternative budget’s launch on Thursday the party’s representatives repeatedly focused on issues affecting children and young people with Mr Nash saying:  “We have record numbers at work, with record numbers of children with no place to call home.

“We have eye-watering business tax returns side by side with shameful levels of child poverty.”

The Labour Party’s plan for free GP care for children would be rolled out over a two-year period, first for under 12s followed by all under 18s the following year.

With the ultimate goal of creating a public childcare service, the party say they would take a number of steps to ease the pressure on the childcare system.

Taking aim at government party’s election promises last year Marie Sherlock TD said they engaged in “a bidding war” to win the votes of families desperate for childcare.

She suggested: “People went into that election believing some of the promises that were made, that there was going to be more childcare places, that we were going to see a real reduction in childcare costs.

“And 12 months on, there’s barely a peep out of government.”

Instead, the Labour Party says it would create 6,000 new childcare places in 104 centres and reduce the costs for parents to 50 euro a week in two years.

It also said it would not bring in the much talked about cut in VAT for the hospitality sector and would, instead, spend 770 million euro on a targeted second tier of child benefit.

Other measures Labour TDs outlined at the launch include the street-by-street retrofitting of homes, where neighbours would be encouraged to retrofit their homes at the same time so they can benefit from economies of scale.

The party’s climate spokesman Ciaran Ahern TD said the party wants to drive “a retrofitting revolution” and called on the government to “ramp up its funding of retrofits for local authority housing”.

The Labour Party also outlined a number of promises to tackle the housing crisis including abolishing Help to Buy and the First Home schemes which Conor Sheehan TD described as “a scam” saying “all they’re doing is driving up house prices”.

The party’s housing spokesperson also claimed that, if in power, Labour would build an additional 6,000 social and affordable homes, convert HSE-owned properties into accommodation for health care workers and would increase the vacant home tax to 10 times the Local Property Tax rate.

He told reporters gathered at the Labour Party’s head office: “We are proposing this as a big stick, essentially to beat people with in order to enforce them to bring their vacant and derelict properties back in to use”.